The Lone Star State and Lone Children

A Texan with a large ranch bordering Mexico said he supported Trump's policy of separating migrant children from their parents: "These people are criminals," he said. "In the United States, citizens who commit crimes are separated from their children." He said he wept for those children--American children--not those who cross American borders illegally. Democrats, the argument continues, care more about these migrants than they do about Americans.
What would the Texan rancher do if he found himself suddenly unable to feed his family or pay his bills? If his children were crying from hunger, if rats were invading the baby's crib, if a drug lord put a price on his head? Would he steal food and fuel for his family? Poverty makes criminals of us all. Australia, the noted historian Niall Ferguson has observed, was a nation founded by shoplifters. British persons convicted of stealing stockings or food got put on ships and deported there--at a time when most transportees initially regarded the region as alien as the planet Mars is to us.
I live in a nation with great health care and reasonable food prices. I'm easily able to feed my family well-balanced, nutritious meals and I don't have to worry about robbery or crime in my neighborhood. Once in a while everything stops while a bomb from the Second World War is found and defused--that happened at our local main train station today--but otherwise, life goes on, with the many, many refugees Germany has absorbed. 
The realities--that the vast majority, if not all, migrants coming across the border are both harmless and easy to help, that the richest of nations can easily afford to help these poor people, is not something the Trump administration cares about. Might I persuade the Texan rancher? Somebody tell me how. 

Zero Tolerance and the American Heart

Our former students left East Germany before the wall fell—the husband by masquerading as a businessman from another part of Germany, counterfeiting an accent unlike his own. The wife followed under mysterious circumstances she’s never explained. The children, both under the age of four, were left with grandparents. At the time our friends left, they had no idea the wall would come down a few months later. They were willing to leave their children behind for an indefinite period. I understood how desperate they were when the husband, a builder, revealed he’d had a friend at a construction site pull out a splinter that had landed in his eye. They'd been “borrowing” materials from the site. Being blind in that eye saved him from going to the hospital, where the doctors would have been too scared not to turn him over to the authorities for stealing.

When I try to imagine conditions that would make me willing to risk death or eternal separation from my children, the families pouring into detention centers in Texas come to mind. They have some idea of the cruel deal imposed upon them by the Trump administration. They are fleeing conditions that make the unwelcome ones they encounter luxurious. Better to be deprived of your children but know they will be fed and clothed; better to be stuck in a cage lying on a pallet in a former WalMart than killed by drug lord, chewed by rats, or starving. I listen to the Pro Publica recording of weeping children begging for their parents and try to imagine what Emma Lazarus would write. Her “New Colossus” sonnet is affixed to the base of our national monument, the statue of liberty,

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

We might as well tear down the statue of liberty. She's no longer allowed to lift her lamp and welcome the "wretched refuse"  because our president insists on blocking refugees from what he's infamously called "shit hole countries." 

 Trump’s business is to separate. He’s separating parents from children, he’s separating citizen from citizen, party from party—his immigration policy is the logical extension of his lifelong mission to divide and conquer. He’s saying and doing things that make us angry. In spite of him we should—as the German comedian Jan Böhmermann said in his “Be Deutsch” video, “hold together, try to be nice.” Ignore the haters—or laugh at them. Volunteer for groups that help get those children reunited with their parents. Speak up, Republicans, and remember Abraham Lincoln’s vision for your party.

When our East German friends settled in a Western German state, they decorated a hallway in their home with a placard purloined from an East German tunnel: “You are now leaving East Germany.” Let us leave behind those who separate; let us pull together and re-make America. On the (1999-2006) TV series The West Wing, the fictional president played by Martin Sheen solved an illegal Chinese immigrant crisis by looking the other way so that detainees could melt into the population. A president with a heart would do this.

The Dotard and the Rocket Man

The sun was shining on the nukes

Shining with all his might

He did his very best to make

The mass destroyers bright

And this was very odd because

The men weren’t there to fight.

The dotard and the rocket man

Were walking side by side

They smiled like anything to see

What other folks had tried

We’ll pile up nukes and dough, both said

And slapped their bellies wide.

The dotard showed the rocket man

A film of future days

One man, one choice, big trains, hotels

On beaches cannons graced.

"Take money, try my brand he said

I’d never be two-faced."

His chain-saw signature poked at

The missile-launching scrawl

Their loose-fit trousers swished and sagged

But signatures stood tall

Each smiled and saw he’d bulldozed fast

And had the other bagged.

“The time has come," the dotard said,

To talk of many things:

Of power, threats, fake news and tax

Of dominance and things

And why those climate changers plot

And damn, we pigs have wings.”

Symmetry in Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry

When I want cleverness, I go to Renaissance poetry with its puzzles and paradoxes. Or I go to T.S. Eliot with his puzzles and paradoxes. Give me George Herbert's pruning poem or "I saw a peacock with a fiery tail" or John Donne's "nor ever chaste except you ravish me" or the humdinger, attributed to Nicholas of Cusa, Empedocles, and Voltaire: "God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
I'm not looking for a story when I'm looking for cleverness. I'm looking to be amused, enlightened,  thrust into a philosophic mood, and startled by the beauty of language.
When I read a novel or a short story or a memoir--a narrative of any kind--I'm looking for something different, something that makes me, I am sure, the wrong reader for Lisa Halliday's experimental Asymmetry. When I read a novel I don't want puzzles and paradoxes: I want to know what happened, meaning, how the central conflicts get resolved. I want to know whether Snape is a good guy; I want to know what makes Anna jump; I want to know--and Lewis Carroll will tell you--how Alice got through the looking glass and made it home.
Halliday's Alice neither gets through the looking glass nor back home again. She's stuck between the float glass and the aluminum powder within three narratives bereft of resolution. 
The tricks--spoiler alert ahead--don't do it for me, because the characters created (and apparently remembered) are so extremely well-drawn, their worlds so anthropologically accurate (how I admire the way Halliday's created the neighborhoods of my youth in New York!) that we want to know what happens to them. We never do.
In part one, "Folly," Mary-Alice, who like Lewis Carroll's Alice is getting bored, meets Ezra Blazer, the pewter-haired stand-in for Philip Roth. She's a grown-up, unlike Alice Liddell, but the pedophilic implications play over the scene nonetheless. The two remark on their relationship as it develops in lovely ways, he wondering whether it's tragic, she conceding it is "around the edges." At the end of "Folly," Ezra's in the hospital and Alice is thinking of leaving him. Then I turn the page to the "Madness" section and find myself alone with Amar Jaafari, a young Iraqi-American inexplicably detained at Heathrow, clearly on charges of flying while Arab. He has something to do with Alice's story only in the sense that she's been reading about Iraq, longing to be a writer, longing to write about people more important than herself, trying to imagine the mind of the "Muslim hot dog seller" and whether she, a choir girl from the midwest, could ever do so. 
We learn all about Amar's life and his tragedies, and toward the end of this section, we're treated to a view of a young blond woman weeping in the holding area across from him--and we know she's Alice because she's wearing the same Searle coat with the black fur around the hood that Ezra bought her back when the two of them were a thing in "Folly." But we don't find out why she's there--except that we're supposed to see her as a character in Jaafari's story, the author of it? Or he is the author of her story? Keep 'em guessing. The final clue comes not in the "Madness" section--which leaves both Alice and Jaafari in a Kafkaesque lack of closure--but in the "Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Discs" section. There, we're treated to Ezra's ramble about the two or three or "all right, maybe four" times that depression hit, when women left him and his brother died. Then the kicker, at least it's supposed to be the kicker, on p. 260-261 of the British edition: "Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness." [Get it? Amar's madness, the war madness, Iraq and Middle East madness.] Ezra goes on: "And we wonder: How did this happen? . . . what good will it do, the willful and belated broadening of my imagination? A young friend of mine has written a rather surprising little novel about this, in its way. About the extent to which we're able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own. It's a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author . . . " 
So now it's confirmed that his young friend, Lisa Halliday or Alice, wrote Asymmetry.
I am one of those readers who feels cheated. Especially because we're getting slammed with that overused "looking glass" metaphor again. No, we did not get through the looking glass. If we had, we'd have learned how Ezra and Alice's relationship ended, what happened to Amar and whether he ever got out of the airport to see Alistair, and what Ezra thinks about Alice's novel--much more of what Ezra thinks of Alice's novel! And then you'd have three novels. Three very long novels. Instead of one skinny, clever novel--too clever by half. I can't help but think this novelist chose not to go through the agony of living through Alice's and Amar's states of mind when they're thrust into the dramas she creates. The ending is a clever deus ex machina rendered popular by the death of my hero, Philip Roth--I think of the miraculous voice of Portnoy and the scintillating plotting--not to mention the panorama of America's race, politics, and gender issues in The Human Stain--and conclude that Asymmetry is a footnote to the life of a genius. 
But more: Lisa Halliday is, I persist in feeling, cheating herself as a novelist. She's selling herself short. Her gifts are considerable--she can create endings, but perversely (it must be that--it could be a desire to be mathematically precise--it can't be laziness) she won't. 
The question of whether the choir girl can imagine the mind of the Muslim hot dog seller--of course she can. Of course he can imagine her mind, too. Literature abounds with unlikely narrators: how did he think of her? Vice versa? One example will suffice: In Thomas Mann's Schwarze Schwäne ("The Black Swan" in English) a menopausal woman who has inexplicably begun to bleed again, argues with her daughter, who has cramps, insisting menstruation is a wonderful experience the daughter ought to appreciate.  I first read this story in a graduate seminar with the late lamented and brilliant Steven Marcus--who, and this is the only time I ever saw this happen, didn't get it. He began the class by saying, "this mother and daughter are having a wonderful, loving conversation." Both I and another women sprang to our feet--I think we did, at least we interrupted him, which none had ever dared to do--and informed him that this mother was anything but loving--she was jealous. How, I later wondered, had Mann gotten so far inside the mind of women that even Steven Marcus didn't understand--when any woman would?
So the answer to Lisa Halliday's Alice is: Of course you can imagine. So imagine. And then imagine Amar's fate--imagine how he does nor does not get out of that airport. Imagine Alice's fate: what are her last romantic moments with Ezra, and why?
Plotting. The hardest part of all. Mastery lies in plots that wind up the reader, moving so smoothly that you can't imagine how the author agonized his or her way through them.
Ms. Halliday: please agonize--tell us the rest of the story. I don't want the symmetries: Oh, look, here's Alice, and here's Alice imagining Amar, or vice versa, and here's Blazer imagining both. I want to know what happened.

What's With Moses Farrow?

My first thought, reading Moses Farrow's blog post: it must be difficult to be Ronan Farrow's brother. Ronan, much younger, much more talented, much more good-looking (he is, after all, the son of Ol' Blue Eyes) and in the opposite corner, skinny Moses Farrow, inelegantly sporting his cerebral palsy. Then there's Moses's opening line: "I’m a very private person and not at all interested in public attention." Why say that, unless you are trying to convince yourself? The chief claim made is: the relationship [between Soon Yi and Woody] itself was not nearly as devastating to our family as my mother’s insistence on making this betrayal the center of all our lives from then on." Is that true? This part of the story sounds real. A raging Mia Farrow screeching is believable. A four-year-old Satchel, later renamed Ronan, repeating “My sister is fucking my father," rings true, too.  Moses Farrow does not seem inclined to invent, and the tales of being slapped, of being yelled at, accused of stealing when he hadn't done anything, of being forced to stand naked in a corner as a punishment for cutting the belt loops off his new jeans because he thought the jeans would look cool that way--all that sounds real. Besides, take a long look at that kid's face with that sombre expression and those big black glasses. The child Moses looks like an Asian version of Woody Allen. If he reminded Farrow of Allen, she may have bullied him. She wouldn't be the first divorcée to hit a child because he resembled her ex.
I can't doubt that Mia Farrow had some mighty meltdowns. But I think of Mary Ann Hoberman's rhyming children's book, The Seven Silly Eaters, in which a mother of seven, trying to make everything perfect, fix everyone's meal, do all the laundry and clean-up and still get to play her cello once in a blue moon, has a complete freak-out. I love that scene: the dad and the kids are peeking into the kitchen from outside, wondering when Mommy will calm down. How many kids did Mia Farrow have? I lost track long ago. There's the ones she had and the ones she adopted--enough for a small boarding school. Did she lose it from time to time? Did she hit and scream at Moses more than she hit and screamed at the others? I wouldn't be surprised. Is she downright crazy, coaching her kids to hate Woody Allen and inventing the abuse story just to get even? That's possible too.
Even assuming all of the above--that Mia Farrow had total meltdowns, hit and humiliated Moses and other children, coached them all to say Woody Allen was evil--does all that add up to Allen being innocent of molesting Dylan Farrow? Dylan says she remembers. A seven-year-old does remember. I do have clear memories of my father's bedtime behavior. My mother never coached me to say anything--she was either oblivious or she looked the other way. Maybe both. Mia is accused of coaching Dylan.
I'm trying to imagine whether I'd have told a whopping lie about my father if my mother had told seven-year-old me to do so. It seems to me I would not have done so. I grew up with immense lies: both parents pretended to get along; my mother lied about her relationship with my father, insisting the two were happy. I could see they were not. I saw this at seven, and long before, and long after. 
Moses Farrow wants to defend his father. But how can he be so sure he saw everything? How can he think he knows Woody Allen never managed to get Dylan alone in a room? How can Moses Farrow think that his sister, at seven, was so malleable as to be forced into a lie--and then to want to continue to tell that lie twenty-one years later? That's hard to imagine. It's hard for me to imagine a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a husband and a life still wanting to please her mother  by dredging up a lie. 
I think Dylan Farrow remembers, because you do remember these things. You can't forget.

How To Get Lymph Drainage Paid For in Germany

You're a cancer patient. You've had surgery. Your leg swells up, or your arm, or you find numb inflated areas where they removed the lymph nodes in your armpit. You realize the condition could worsen, become permanent. You start phoning around for an appointment and find nothing but waiting lists.

Pause to define lymph drainage, which your doctor has mentioned, but not defined: it's not something involving blood, tubes, puncturing, pumping out fluid. Which is what I imagined, and hence did not want. But lymph drainage is only a very gentle form massage to get the fluid making your leg swell up go away, or disperse through the body.

If you want this kind of help, you have to use either the word "oncology" or the word "cancer," so that you're not waiting around weeks while the condition gets worse. If you can't get an appointment two days from now, you haven't said the magic words: "I am a cancer patient." Bother your gynecologist for a prescription first--if she says no, head for the Hausarzt, that is, the internist, the one you go to for flu and shots. If you can't get it from that doctor, grab your oncologist by the lapels and beg. Once you've got a prescription, find the best place in town. Try to get at least ten 60-minute sessions.

And don't be surprised. I went for lymph drainage on my leg, which continues to look like Frankenstein's forehead. Until recently, I couldn't bend my knee, but I started stretching and bending a great deal on the day my Russian radiologist told me things would never get any better--I was stuck with this crummy leg for life. 

"Well, you could put a pillow under it when you sleep," said she, shaking her head over the notion that lymph drainage would do much. There's nothing like Russian gloom to galvanize an American. Instinctively, I rebelled against her pessimism with my outrageous optimism. 

"Oh, yeah?" I thought. "I'll show you!" 

In my first lymph drainage session, the therapist started massaging an area right under my collarbone. I wondered what the Sam Hill he was doing. I was about to say something, when my foot started tingling, as if something were moving around. The feeling was like the one I have when I hold my legs in the air to get the fluid to drain from my ankles to my legs. So the guy knew what he was doing. He worked on the leg, too, of course. 

I have nine more sessions, and this treatment is expensive. So I'll ask the gynecologist for more--I'm not shy. Then I'll ask the internist. Then the oncologist. In other words, I'll be persistent. This is cancer. Just when you want everyone hovering around you asking what you need, you'll have to be running around demanding exactly that. But take heart--keeping active that way is probably good for you.

A Pumpkin's Theory of Harry and Meghan: Ten Clues

She's great, he's gorgeous, they're in love--I take all this for granted. But  from the sour Germaine Greer to Meghan's wicked-half sister, screeched off the screen by Piers Morgan, everyone's got a theory. Before turning into a pumpkin, way past this midnight hour, I thought I'd observe rather than predict, but spoiler alert: my predictions lead up to happily ever after:

(1) Meghan's a tall, dark outsider 

(2) Like Dodi Al Fayad

(3) She's nicer

(4) Refreshingly like Diana, Meghan's exactly the age at which Harry last knew his mother.

(5) But saner

(6) Diana wanted to escape with Dodi

(7) Meghan offers escape, too--from dullness, stuffiness, dreary royalness

(8) Harry is delighted to have this woman who offers a host of familiar traits that remain among the last he associated with his late mother.

(9) Meghan is maternal and

(10) Her prince has come

On Being Spammed: Does that Escort Service in Bangalore Know They're Cozying Up To Cancer?

For weeks now, ladies and gentleman, a single post of my almost-unread blog has been spammed by  an outfit that calls itself "Rakhisen Bangalore Escorts" and whose website, picturing a languid beauty in reflector shades sunning herself in a place seemingly more Caribbean than Bangalorean, urges me to call "right away." No matter how many times I hit the permanent delete key, their ads pop up again and again, like weeds, or, well, unwanted cancer calls, the kind that turn into big fat cancer tumors when you have the kind of wonky genes sported by yours truly, as proved by my FoundationOne test. Now, FoundationOne could spam me all they like, if they want to, but I'd just like to point out they're too classy to do so. Eventually their tests will save lives, but I would enjoy letting the many Escort Services In Bangalore who dump their ads on a blog post concerning a clinical trial for cancer that they're associating cancer with their escort service. That's entirely appropriate, clinically speaking (but maybe not from a business point of view?)
I'm sure my readers remain aware that they can get the HPV virus from sexual contact, also that sexual contact is generally speaking what escort services offer, and I'm sure you all know that this particular virus can cause uterine cancer and girls, believe me, you don't want to deal with uterine cancer. I'm dealing with breast cancer metastasized to the bone right now, and when I go in for my monthly Fulvestrant shots, I never know whether I'm going to get the short, slim nurse with the tattoos who knows now to give the shot painlessly or the last idiot I had, whose method resulted in my nearly blacking out--thanks to the idiot's technique, I think I know what it must feel like to be beaten, because these shots are given in the gluteus maxiumus, the last place you'd want an injection if you had a choice in the matter. Which I don't. Another thing about so-called escort services: they tend, oh, in my opinion, to exploit young, often underage girls who have no way to make a living other than to hang on the arm of and be sexually abused by the sort of man who needs an escort service because he has no idea how to fall in love. I've now deleted ads for escorts in Bangalore about ten times from the very same post. I wonder how persistently they will continue to spam me, now that I've made it clear that every single ad they lob to my blog--and on a post about the cancer drug Palbociclib, no less--associates their product with an incurable and exceedingly unpleasant disease. Will this be curtains for those Bangalore escort ads? Gee, I really hope so. 

Easy, Spicy Hummus

If you love garlic and Middle-Eastern flavors, this one's for you:

Assemble the following: 

800 grams (for Americans, that is about 5 cups, but net equivalents are contradictory) of canned or bottled chick peas. If you want to go really pioneer, soak dry chick peas overnight with about two teaspoons of baking soda--then you'd have to drain and cook them--yes, you can do all this, but why bother?)

Tahini or Sesame paste (about six tablespoons--or more!)

Six or eight cloves of garlic

A big, preferably organic, lemon

A teaspoon (or more) of cumin

Olive oil--about a third of a cup

Salt and pepper, to taste.

Parsley OR paprika, to taste (optional)

Pour the chick peas into a sieve. Rinse them in cool water, let them drain, and dump them into your food processor. If you don't have a food processor handy, one of those electric wands will do--my old food processor died as I was trying to make this).

Peel and add the garlic and the cumin. Squeeze the lemon juice through a sieve into the mix. Add olive oil and shake in pepper and salt. Process. When you are done, add as garnish either chopped fresh parsley or paprika.

You can dip crudités into this hummus, eat it with a spoon, or spread it, as I did, on a slightly warmed lavash, adding lots of small chopped tomatoes, then roll up the lavash and eat it. Tortillas would work too.

Fabulously Easy Pork Shoulder

The kids were sick of chicken; they didn't go for my curry either. It was time to try something new, and though we'd had many a pork roast, they were sick of that, too. I tried Jamie Oliver's recipe but it was too complicated for me; I whizzed through a number of others, and have now experienced the truth of the single most frequently appearing insight: the longer you bake it at a low temperature, the better it is.

Assemble the following ingredients:

Big hunk of pork (three and a half American pounds, or 1.718 kilos)
Honey
Mustard
Garlic
Olive oil (a good one!)
Balsamic vinegar
Dry red wine 
Onions (preferably red ones)
Apples
Potatoes and, if you're feeling ambitious,
Carrots
Sweet potatoes

Step one: Mix up the honey, mustard, olive oil, garlic, and balsamic vinegar in proportions that please you--I go heavy on the honey and mustard, easy on the balsamic vinegar. With your garlic press, crush about eight cloves and add to the mix. Stir or beat well with a whisk. The mix should smell good; taste it to make sure.

Step two: Coat the hunk of pork (should have a bone in it somewhere--adds flavor) with the mix, put it in a zip lock bag, and leave it in the fridge overnight.

Step three: Pre-heat the oven to 220º C (428ºF).  Take your favorite huge pot with a lid--we just decided we were grown-ups and deserved a set of Le Creuset and are painstakingly, one piece at a time, acquiring it: so I used the classic orange (which the company now calls "iconic flame") dutch oven. 

A word, quite a long one before we get to Step Four: a thing that made me fall in love with Le Creuset, apart from its wonderful quality and color, is that one of my favorite writers, Alexandra Fuller, describes how her completely insane snob of a mother (not Fuller's way of describing her, just mine) carried her own set of Le Creuset everywhere the family went during the Rhodesian bush war. A few years ago, Fuller penned, going into uncharacteristically romantic details, a  depiction of her mom (but she'd say "Mum") :  "suddenly I found myself in unexpected tears thinking about what those pots represented: Cooking pots on the top of a tiny bundle of other belongings seems to be the universal image of women fleeing war across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s; women leaving the Dustbowl of Oklahoma during the Depression; women escaping post-election violence in Zimbabwe in 2008; women displaced by the current violence in Congo and Sudan. Pots are like the external expression of a woman’s womb, the way in which she can continue to nurture and protect her family, even when the land beneath her feet has been torn from her and all real hope has been lost."

That's all very lovely, but has nothing to do with why her mother saved those pots. If I know her mother, the woman saved those pots for exactly the reasons I, a not-so-secret social climber, would save mine: because they are so damn beautiful, so breathtakingly classy, a sign that, as her mother would say, "we have breeding."

Now, I don't have a damn bit of breeding and I'm not sure her mother did either, at least not in the sense of being up there by having any relatives born above the rank of "Laird." Hey, she did better than me. We're peasants to the marrow, although one of my really horrible ancestors was a U.S. president who grabbed the Northern half of Mexico, adding it on to Texas and California. 

Step 4: Remove the pork from the fridge. Keeping it in its zip lock bag, let it cool its heels on your counter until it seems at room temperature.

Step 5: Rub some extra-virgin, incredibly expensive, super-classy olive oil into the bottom of your Le Creuset Dutch oven. Slice five or six big red or white onions, core and slice the same number of apples. If you've had time to boil a few carrots for ten minutes, add them. Pour in a cup of dry red wine. Undo the zip lock bag and dump the pork, marinade and all, on top of the apple-onion-carrot mix. Put in oven UNCOVERED for about forty minutes. 

Step 6: While the pork is in the oven, boil some potatoes--any kind; I used plain white potatoes the first time around but think sweet potatoes would be good--for about ten minutes, until you can poke a fork in, but they should be firm. Drain them and slice them, add to pot.

Step 7: Cover the pork. Turn the heat down to 170º C (338ºF). Go away and do anything you like for five hours. 

The truth is, I intended to return after three and a half hours, but an event at my child's school went on and on and on. Finally we left early, because I was afraid the pork would be all dried out and burned up, the house along with it. 

But guess what? The pork was perfect. Perfect "pulled pork." Yum. Serve with a mixed salad and a dry red wine.

The Once and Future Trump (with apologies to Yertle the Turtle)

In the far-away mansion of Mar-a-lago

America’s President’s counting his dough

A nicely huge mansion, baroque and outré

Where Trumpety Dumpety gets his own way.

He tweets up a storm; our boy’s busy indeed

He yawns and he wonders who next to mislead.

He goes with the flow and he hires and he fires

When he can squeeze time from fulfilling desires

With prostitutes, pee, kinky sexual positions

He’s managing mergers and yes, acquisitions

Glad-hands North Korea while tickling Putin

Though Stormy’s tough lawyer’s gone all highfalutin’

“Why won’t they just see that the girl’s just a ho?”

The world is against me! Hey, go with my flow!”

That is what the Trump said when he fell on his head

But Fox News wouldn’t say that he actually bled.

Stormy Daniels, Lies, and Pee Tapes . . . oh, and taxes. P.S. Comey

It's a measure of humanity that we don't want to know what we don't want to know. Trump's base is solid even though or maybe because he did it with Stormy Daniels--he's just a man, after all, and the Lord will forgive him. She's a tempter, like Eve, and the Lord will punish her. And those tapes of him with Russian prostitutes peeing on the bed the Obamas had slept in? That's just a nasty story. Shhh. Don't say such things around children. His taxes? What taxes? He's just like us, only he has more money. He makes it okay not to pay your taxes. That Michael Wolff, he's a scandal-monger, and we don't like them. Same for that James Comey. Don't need their books--it's all gossip.

And in the opposite corner, people like me who read both, who would rather have books that at least record, for posterity, the fall of American civilization. Who listen to Madeleine Albright. Who can't believe any of this is happening as it unfolds before us, the forest fire that is the Trump presidency, as Comey put it.  I consider the Declaration of Independence, the founding belief that "all men are created equal." Back in 1776, "all men" did not include women or anyone whose skin wasn't white. "All men" meant men with money and power; "all men" meant men with land. Jefferson owned about 200 slaves. Over time, the original meaning changed, and it's clear from Jefferson's letters that he wanted an aristocracy of "talent and virtue" not one of "birth and wealth." But in today's American oligarchy, "all men are created equal" if they are men, like Donald Trump, and rich, like Donald Trump, and willing to support him, so he increases their wealth. Perhaps, as a young student remarked, "all men are created evil." Maybe we should listen to Dee Dee Myers, an American political analyst who, after distinguished service as the White House Press Secretary during the first two years of the Clinton administration, wrote Why Women Should Rule The World (2009). Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Dee Dee Myers, Oprah, women of Hollywood, women in business, anybody but Ivanka: save us. At any rate, restore democracy.

Designed by a German Radiologist: My Comb-Over

So symmetrical! So rectangular!

After radiation, I felt no side effects beyond a little fatigue. The back of my head felt a little sensitive, but it was only after we spent a day at a thermal bath that I noticed, while washing my hair, that great clumps of it seemed to be coming out. But I looked in the mirror and everything seemed normal--there was just this extra fringe of hair at the bottom. So I went to the hairdresser and I guess she thought I could see the back of my head . . . "No, can't cut it with a V-shape at the back, because you'll have the same problem . . ." What problem? The one I had back when I was bald as a peeled egg during chemo? Yes, that problem. 
In the photo, I'm lifting up my hair. I was sitting, reading, and I lifted up my hair the way you do when you're thinking, and my daughter, who was standing behind me, gasped, and said there was a bald spot. Well, of course! I just hadn't seen it. Fortunately, neither had anybody. Only my hairdresser knew for sure . . . I look at this bald patch and think: draw some eyes and a big nose and you've got a strange version of Kilroy Was Here. Look at the precision. Only a German radiologist could get those 90-degree angles. 
My hair: the one thing I have in common with Donald Trump. As in this video:

But MY comb-over is much better designed, in fact, a feat of German engineering. Designed to cover the skull, is mine. You'd just never know . . . unless you looked. 

The Perfect Cancer-Undermining Vegan Meal, or Really Fancy Vegetables Taste Good

Everything on this plate fights cancer, in the sense of reducing inflammation, plus offers other health benefits, like cutting the chances of thrombosis, and filling you with healthful vitamins. I can't promise any cures, but the meal does take the edge off those post-treatment doldrums, and the glass of red wine to the right of the plate sure helps, too.

So colorful, too!

This meal relies heavily on the culinary notions of Rebecca Katz, of The Cancer Fighting Kitchen fame. I love her recipes--especially her Magic Mineral Broth, a delicious substance that really does make you feel better after chemo, and which is the basis for many of her recipes. Here she is making it:

I like her recipes so much I want more . . . of almost every flavor-enhancing ingredient, that is. Notice that smallish piece of kombu she uses in the video? When I make Magic Mineral Broth, I put in about three times that amount. While crunching down on a piece of kombu as a snack. Stuff tastes great. A salty little cracker that smells like the sea. 
In the photo above, I've relied on Ms. Katz's recipe for Purple Peruvian Smashed Potatoes, also known as Vitelottes, the French variety. You need a fourth of a cup of the Magic Mineral Broth for these, and her recipe calls for finely chopped chives, but since I didn't have chives I sautéed some diced shallots in extra-virgin olive oil and added those instead. I used the chopped parsley she recommended, only more (see how much green is in that purple?) I used her Basic Broccoli recipe for the green stuff to the left of the Peruvian potatoes, except that her recipe calls for just a tablespoon of finely chopped garlic, so I used about four. Ditto for the tomatoes, the basil, the lemon juice. I did follow her instructions exactly the first time I made the recipe, but my daughter and I agreed that we liked even more flavor. I also blanched the broccoli for sixty seconds, instead of the thirty she suggests. 
At the top of the plate are some Pappadums, which I fried in vegetable oil, and which added a delicious crunchy texture that complemented the other ingredients. So, if you're into big flavor and mostly Vegan, the Katz cookbooks are the way to go.

An Interview with BOTUS: Marlon Bundo Tells All

Critical Mom: Mr. Bundo, it's an honor to meet you! Congratulations on your marriage!
Marlon: (gently patting silk bow tie) Why, thank you.
Critical Mom: Your Wesley seems so considerate and cute!
Marlon: (with a tranquil sigh) So handsome! Makes wonderful blueberry-mesclun-bell-pepper salad, too!
Critical Mom: Lovely, just lovely. How's the romance between POTUS and FLOTUS by the way?
Marlon: (small gasp) Please! I thought we were only going to speak of happy things! I mean, I just got married! We're going on a honeymoon!
Critical Mom: Oooh, lovely, nowhere near Watership Down, I trust?
Marlon: Please! 
Critical Mom: (getting carried away) I mean, The White House might as well be Efrafa, with General Woundwort running around . . . 
Marlon: (with a nervous chuckle) Now, now, you know well, Ms. Critical Mom, that the secret service won't allow me to divulge Wesley's and my destination. We like privacy, you know. Rabbit holes and all? I mean (Bundo reddens slightly) I mean . . . we're bunnies and all . . .
Critical Mom: I understand perfectly! I see our conversation has brought a blush to the cheek of a young person. Tell me, is Mr. Pence a kind man, at heart? Do you think he'll ever understand?
Marlon: Well, he did say he enjoyed Hamilton. That's something. Er, it's just that well, I'm kind of an inexperienced bunny. A virgin.
Critical Mom. Yes, indeedy. Mike Pence likes virgins! There's some common ground! Well, thank you so much for your time!
Marlon: Thank you!
Critical Mom: And here's a great big basket of carrots and dandelions from me. Have a wonderful time!

Billionaires of the World Unite: Stormy Daniels Needs Your Support

If I were Warren Buffett, I'd be buying Stormy Daniels and her lawyer dinner at a restaurant so lovely and exclusive that she'd never run into "Mr. President" there. I'd discreetly hand her an envelope with at least twenty million in it around dessert time, and with promises of more cash to come. I'd also provide her with funding for bodyguards, spa cures, and vegan shakes. I'd enlist all the other nice billionaires I know--how about Ingvar Kamprad and Karl Albrecht? Haven't all those megabuck dudes noticed that a certain crooked businessman who runs the U.S. like a gigantic personal business while never paying taxes or admitting that he never pays taxes is giving other rich folks a bad name? If you don't want to save Stormy for her own sake, save her for yours! She's fun, and her lawyer's a hero.

Getting the FoundationOne Test In Germany: Fifteen Tips

As you probably know, if you're a cancer patient, neither genetic nor genomic testing is likely to be covered by your German insurance company, unless (1) you have two or three relatives with the same kind of cancer or (2) your insurance company is really nice. Nevertheless, Germany being devoted to bureaucracy, you may find yourself in a situation like mine. So here are some tips:

(1) Tell your gynecologist or your oncologist that you would like FoundationOne genomic testing. 

(2) Watch your oncologist sweat. "I'm not allowed to order the test," said my oncologist, "Because of #$%^&*UIO and WERTYHJ@#$%TY," (In other words, I couldn't follow her explanation.)

(3) Go to your gynecologist or your general practitioner (Hausartz) and say you'd like her to order the test.  Watch her sweat. In my case, I went to my gynecologist first, because I'd written to the  FoundationOne company, who advised me that either my oncologist or my gynecologist could write the test order.

(4) Listen to lengthy explanation from worried, guilty gynecologist that the test is "off-label," therefore very expensive, and maybe the insurance company will not approve, and maybe I'll have to pay for the test myself.

(5) Start a GoFundMe (or the crowdfunding company of your choice, but GoFundMe was great) to raise money for the test.

(6) Write to your insurance company and cc the mail to your gynecologist and your oncologist. Send every diagnosis you ever got to the insurance company, while feeling as though you were promising to hand over your firstborn child.

(7) Call your oncologist to let her know your insurance company might be paying, but meanwhile you'd really like this test. Listen to her get irritated about how she's answered lots of emails from you.

(8) Explain to time-pressed, overworked gynecologist that she really has to read this email your insurance company just wrote.

(9) Get (if you're lucky) a definite approval from your insurance company and dance merrily to your gynecologist in hopes of getting her to write the order for the test. Watch her writhe in her chair and explain that sometimes insurance companies tell doctors "You prescribed too many off-label tests! Pay up!" In other words, she's afraid of being stuck with the 5000 euros, or the 3000-something euros. Five years after the fact. Which is also five years after the time you're floating in heaven or frying in hell.

(10) Offer to pay. Your GoFundMe cash just came through.

(11) Listen to her say "No," you don't pay . . . 

(12) Talk to the oncologist again. She still can't write the order for the test.

(13) Go see the oncologist, who's willing to send in the tissue sample. 

(14) Listen to her when she mentions that you could just try your general practitioner: "All you need is that Stempel." (the official bureaucratic stamp).

(15) Go to Hausartz about another, unrelated form you need filled out. After that form is taken care of, slide the FoundationOne form across the table. Have her sign it while she's so busy she doesn't know what she's signing.

P.S. The tissue sample is now in the mail! I'll keep you posted.

The Fulvestrant Follies

If radiation is the kinky tanning salon--and believe me, it is, with your head buckled to the table and then having to take your pants down so they can blast the other tumor in your leg, and then technicians edging your leg into place but you're not allowed to move it yourself--then Fulvestrant injections are the sadist's dream. You might as well be asked to bend over in a Victorian spanking fantasy. 

Actually, I just had to lie on a gurney and the nurse was perfectly nice, but the experience took me back to the tetanus shot I had to have ("Oh, you mean, it's not going to be in my arm?") after I cracked my forehead open on the faucet while wrestling my lice-ridden three-year-old into a shampoo. 

You have to take your pants down with the Fulvestrant, and you have to lie there while the nurse injects the shot right into your buttock. I was told it was going to be my hip. "Hip" is a euphemism. Then you roll over and she does the other buttock. I have to admit the experience was not excruciating, but it was absolutely no fun and right up there with the Most Unpleasant Things I Have Ever Done, including becoming infected with campylobacteria in Peru, trying, with very limited Spanish, to explain my predicament to a pharmacist, who figured out, from the way I was writhing at her counter, was the matter was, having vomiting and diarrhea and fever from said bacteria all the way home on two flights--while tending to the needs of three energetic children. 

Fulvestrant comes but once every two weeks--and then once a month--thank goodness. I walked home (or, rather, poled my way home on crutches, my leg still in its postoperative state) and feel okay, and rather hungry. On the advice of my 78-year-old friend who's had Stage 4 ovarian cancer for five years, I'm going back to my glass or two of red wine every night.  I noticed it really settled my stomach after radiation, and besides--a glass of wine does wonders for the soul.  One sip of the ruby-red liquid and I'm distracted from the memory of that needle--although I'll never forget it. 

Storm on, Stormy! Get him!

It's International Women's Day, and about time the witty, gracious Stormy Daniels took down our so-called president. The man who's disgraced the office and the title ought to be felled by a lovely porn star: it's positively Dantesque. Back in Dante's inferno, the sinners are arranged in ten circles, ranging from the ones at the top, the "not so bad," the adulterous lovers, to the truly evil, those who betrayed their benefactors. In the first circle, those illicit lovers are bandied about in a whirlwind, just as they let themselves be guided by the winds of passion in life--but they get blown away from, rather than toward, their former lovers. That punishment is known as "Contrapasso," literally translated as "suffer the opposite," and the idea is for the punishment to fit the crime. The false prophets--magicians, astrologers, for instance, the ones whom Dante perceives as having tried to see the future by forbidden means, now have their heads on backwards--they will literally never look forward, certainly not as far as the future, again.
Now where to put "David Dennison" aka Donald Trump, who appears to have failed to have signed his own legal document?
He'd be getting off way too easy if he were placed among the adulterers. He's certainly a false prophet. He's a betrayer of his benefactors--the American people, and, especially, on International Women's Day, of his wife, Melania, and his young son, Barron, who will always live with the knowledge that his father couldn't even stay faithful for a few months. Not for a nanosecond, I suppose.
Now, "David Dennison" has arranged things so that Stormy Daniels will have to pay a million bucks if she describes his junk or their encounters.
Where are the millionaires, not to mention the billionaires? They ought to be ponying up the dough to help our savior, Stormy! Why doesn't someone run a GoFundMe to pay any legal bills this woman encounters and help her live a life of ease? Come on, people--support Stormy! She's the American people's best friend. She can bring down The Donald. I can just see him up to the neck in the lowest, deeply frozen circle, Cocytus, still a talking head, able to complain that things are just not fair, Mommy.
Thank you, Stormy! You're a national treasure.

The Critical Mom's Cozy Winter Chicken

A chicken dinner in Winter should offer plenty of vitamins, prevent colds, and taste hearty and filling--it should stick to your ribs. I suggest an organic or corn-fed chicken, and I'd go with the recommendation of a New York Times recipe: salt and pepper the bird, put it in a dish, and leave it in the fridge overnight or at least for a few hours. The skin with get crispier this way when you bake the bird. I rinse and pat dry before the salt-and-pepper phase and believe the bird is improved by this, but find I am in a minority.

When you're ready to make dinner: boil red potatoes, or a mix or red potatoes and sweet potatoes, until you can easily poke a fork into them. They shouldn't be falling apart. Line your baking dish with these; add a little olive oil, garlic salt, and pepper. Set the bird right on top and stuff with a handful of fresh flat-leaf (or regular) parsley, a few cloves of garlic, and a lemon sliced in half--squeeze a little of the juice on top of the chicken. Bake for about an hour and fifteen minutes (depending on the size of the chicken) at 200º C, about 400º F. Enjoy!

A pleasant side dish: toss brussel sprouts in olive oil and maple syrup, add garlic salt and cumin. Bake for about 45 minutes (or less) at 200º.  Put in this dish after the chicken's been incubating for a good fifteen minutes. Happy Eating!